Since moving to KMail2 and the Semantic Desktop, several months ago, I have had the most extreeme and hard to solve issues with KDE and especially the KDE PIM apps. They all seem related to the reliance on akonadi and possibly D-Bus. Possibly also Nepomuk.

Problems typically include:

a. The PIM related applications do not launch properly (including Dolphin)
b. Mail do not show properly
c. Pure crashes and hangs

All of this renders my desktop environment almost useless. I find this extremely unusual for a Linux environment.

I have searched the web extensively, including the Gentoo Forum and the KDE bug reporting sites to find people that have overcome these problems. But I have not found any posts that have helped me to either find nor solve the root causes of my problems. I see people having the same problem. But what surprises me the most is that if many people would be affected by the same problems, there should be a revolution of complaints about KDE and extreme agony out there. But in relation to the problems it is in fact quite quiet.

Is it only me that can not solve these problems? And what is the state of KDE really?
I run the "stable" branch of Gentoo with KDE 4.8.3

I don't have those problems with my kde! Did you try with a new profile ?

P.S. I run testing._________________"Dear Enemy: may the Lord hate you and all your kind, may you be turned orange in hue, and may your head fall off at an awkward moment."
"Linux is like a wigwam - no windows, no gates, apache inside..."

Trying a new profile in this case means either with new user or renaming/deleting your .kde4 directory _________________"Dear Enemy: may the Lord hate you and all your kind, may you be turned orange in hue, and may your head fall off at an awkward moment."
"Linux is like a wigwam - no windows, no gates, apache inside..."

You mean the .kde4 directory will be re-created "fresh", possibly solving some of my issues?

Is there a risk of configuration/data loss removing it? I guess it might be safe to re-name it .kde4_BUP of the like?

I always rename it to .kde4_backup. That means that at the next log in you'll have a brand new kde, you can revert by renaming back kde4_backup to .kde4 _________________"Dear Enemy: may the Lord hate you and all your kind, may you be turned orange in hue, and may your head fall off at an awkward moment."
"Linux is like a wigwam - no windows, no gates, apache inside..."

Since moving to KMail2 and the Semantic Desktop, several months ago, I have had the most extreeme and hard to solve issues with KDE and especially the KDE PIM apps. They all seem related to the reliance on akonadi and possibly D-Bus. Possibly also Nepomuk... I find this extremely unusual for a Linux ...
Is it only me that can not solve these problems? And what is the state of KDE really?

I'm glad you're having problems running KDE 4.8.3 with semantic desktop! At least I now know that I'm not alone in concluding that the nepomuk functions are poorly coded and "not the unix way." I run kde 4.8.3 on Archlinux and compile everything on my system from source code (hence I lurk in the gentoo forums). I had a system like yours compiled with gcc 4.6.3, and now have upgraded my toolchain to use gcc 4.7. Everything on my Arch system was compiled with gcc 4.7 except grub

With both my previous "release" with the more stable toolchain and my latest release with gcc 4.7 kde is very well behaved and I love it. It's rock solid. except for nepomuk stuff. It looked like nepomuk was mostly useable at last! But then I got a few weird errors like you did. I found solutions that required removing some nepomuk files from ~/kde4 or ~/.config. And bam Kmail no longer knew anything about my mail account or showed any of my mail. I just can't accept unreliability of my mail client; as far as I'm concerned the nepomuk programmer(s) just isn't up to writing system-level code (with multi-threading) and will probably never get it right. There seems to be a race to catch the last oops when the code should have been correct but feature-incomplete from the beginning (the unix way).

I just wanted to sympathize with you. I've ordered a second SSD so that I can build up a new Arch system in parallel with my present one, this time without semantic desktop in KDE (AFAIK primarily achieved by removing the entire trees that are rooted at rasqal && virtuoso && libmysqlclient && shared-desktop-ontologies (which will remove redland/raptor/soprano/akonadi/mysql) and then starting over re-adding everything that was lost (except kdepim) starting with kdelibs with -semantic-desktop (-DWITH_SharedDesktopOntologies=OFF / -DWITH_Soprano=OFF).

If I'm wrong about the basics of building kde with -semantic-desktop I'd be grateful if someone would warn me.

....Is it only me that can not solve these problems? And what is the state of KDE really?
...there should be a revolution of complaints about KDE and extreme agony out there. But in relation to the problems it is in fact quite quiet.

The stable upgrade from KDEPIM 4.4.11.1 to KDEPIM 4.7.3 is a MAJOR upgrade
with potential for major breakage. Therefore we will *try* to keep
and support the old, so-far stable KDEPIM 4.4.11.1 as long as possible.
If you *dont* want to upgrade your KDEPIM yet but keep the old version,
please download the following file and add it into your
/etc/portage/package.mask:
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/kde/kdepim-4.7-mask.txt
If you decide to upgrade, please have a look at the upgrade guide first:
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDEPIM-4.7_upgrade

You certainly can google for dilfridge's blog (A gentoo kde dev) where you could read that himself might wait for 4.9.+ before retesting kmail2

So no ! You are not alone and if the noise ceased, it might well be because those who were the most angry switched for thunderbird or equivalent.

As far as I am concerned, I strictly followed the advice given and go on using kmail1 under my 4.8.3_________________

I have found that since 4.0, kdepim (including kmail) has not only not improved, but regressed into a generally unusable state. I try it every few releases or so, but it's always horribly broken...usually more horribly broken with each new release. I gave up and have been happily using Thunderbird for the last year. I simply no longer believe it will ever be usable.

One of the glories of Gentoo is that KDE has a semantic-desktop USE flag that you can turn off. You find then you can't emerge kdepim-meta, but as you've learned, it's a source of woe anyway.

It really is too bad. In all the great tumult at the start of KDE4, one of the themes was the oh-so-slick idea of integrating Nepomuk and its starry-eyed promises into KDE. Give it to the KDE developers: they are a persistent lot. They got KDE4 to where it is pretty usable. I had one machine running it at version 4.4 and now by 4.8 I have it everywhere. The really ambitious idea at the start of KDE4, the thing that would be so slick and the compelling reason everyone would surely switch to KDE, was this magic software that you index your disks, sniff your emails and browser history, look at your photos, listen to your music, and keep your address list. In practice it has been big consumer of resources that also makes things less stable. Too bad it's so ill-mannered. Ah, the promise.

I say they should give it a rest. If they moved to a database setup with more modest goals to back up their PIM applications, they might have programs that actually work well. My bet is if they actually did chop Strigi the octopus and Nepomuk the cycle-stealer away from Akonadi, the PIM programs might actually be useful. Sad to say, but that seems not to be in the grand plan.

Just for grins, I emerged KDE 4.8.3 on one machine with semantic-desktop enabled. The PIM applications do look interesting, but I know to stay away from them for anything useful. It's a sad thing for an environment that otherwise works so well.

FWIW, I use KDE 4.8.whatever, +semantic-desktop and kdepim without problem.

Biggest gripe is that it can be a bit slow sometimes, particularly after rsyncing my maildir from my desktop to a second maildir structure on my netbook. That means there's a delay while nepomuk reindexes all the rsynced mail. But I'm happy to put up with that, as I only do it before setting off on a trip. (I guess if I did it regularly, it would be quicker, but haven't tested).

It is interesting that you Goverp and Kollin have KDE 4.8 with Semantic Desktop and do not experience problems. Then there is a chance that I still ave a particular problem that can be solved._________________/Phil

It is interesting that you Goverp and Kollin have KDE 4.8 with Semantic Desktop and do not experience problems. Then there is a chance that I still ave a particular problem that can be solved.

I forgot one regular problem I still have, which is that sometimes the desktop hangs during startup. I suspect it's related to alerts for upcoming events being launched before the desktop is ready. I bypass it by using the emergency session (or whatever it's called).

Whatever, IMHO the basic issue is kdepim's documentation - when I go looking to find out how to diagnose problems and what it should be doing, there's a whole raft of misinformation and out of date crap, and AFAIK nothing current and authoritative. Heck, does anyone know how to get a proper trace out of it?_________________Greybeard

Since KDE SC 4.8.x or so, KDE PIM is in a usable state. I have built the suite with +semantic-desktop, but disabled most of it. kmail2 hasn't crashed in a long time, and while it's not the most beautiful piece of software, I can live with it now. I would have probably moved to Thunderbird before when there would have been an oxygen theme for it._________________backend.cpp:92:2: warning: #warning TODO - this error message is about as useful as a cooling unit in the arctic

I agree - kmail is now working fine; I don't use the nepomuk search
but instead recoll, which is excellent_________________.... there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth
doing as simply messing about with Linux ...
(apologies to Kenneth Graeme)

I still have the issue of launch kdepim apps with KDE4.10rc from kde overlay. I think that kdepim depends on semantic-desktop is not a good decision. Hope some one can have a patch to totally disable it for KDEPIM apps.